Afghanistan

Roundtable on Targeted Killing: A Meditation on Reciprocity and Self-Defense in Relation to Targeted Killing

[This is the second part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings . Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar. Click here for the introduction to the roundtable.]  There is an emergent Israeli/American controversy on the lawfulness of targeted killing. Although the policy has not yet ripened into a national debate, in the United States at least it is beginning. Lisa Hajjar’s assessment of the “legalization” of targeted killing is compelling in a number of respects, including suggesting the analogy to the ...

US Military in Afghanistan

"Have a Nice Day, Buddy:" What The Actions of a Few US Marines Say About Us All

Golden, like a shower, said one of the US marines as he urinated, along with three of his fellow officers, on three dead Afghans. Over the last forty-eight hours this grizzly spectacle has resuscitated the horrific images of US soldiers’ torturing and sexually humiliating men from Abu Ghraib prison to Guantanamo Bay. Then as now, brown bodies are the raw material through and upon which US soldiers realize their darkest fantasies and their deepest secrets. The pornography that popularized the “golden shower” and the Islamophobia that fuels the War on Terror inspire these scenes. In them, US soldiers feminize Muslim men and demonstrate their power over them. US soldiers ...

UNAMA Report: Mistreatment of Conflict-Related Detainees in Afghan Facilities

[The following is the latest from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on the maltreatment of detainees in Afghanistan.] UNAMA Report: Mistreatment of Conflict-Related Detainees in Afghan Facilities From October 2010 to August 2011, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) interviewed 379 pre-trial detainees and convicted prisoners at 47 detention facilities in 22 provinces across Afghanistan. In total, 324 of the 379 persons interviewed were detained by National Directorate of Security (NDS) or Afghan National Police (ANP) forces for national security crimes - suspected of being Taliban fighters, suicide attack facilitators, ...

State Sanctioned Killings

It is now an undisputed fact, confirmed by President Obama: the United States has executed two American citizens far away from zones of actual armed conflict and without due process. More than anything, the targeted killings of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan in Yemen represent serious challenges to the United States’ reputation for abiding by the rule of law. The killings further complicate US foreign policy in a region currently witnessing bloody revolutions and uprisings motivated by a desire for stronger protection of human rights. It is hard to escape the impression that Obama’s unlawful targeted killings program will ultimately stain this administration’s ...

Curriculum: Tools for Reclaiming Communities from Militarism

To mark the now decade-long US-led “Global War on Terror,” The War Resisters League and the South Asia Solidarity Initiative have created an interactive, popular eduction-style workshop that explores how organizing against federal military spending relates to and can forward local campaigns for economic justice, as well as how the past decade of war has effected Afghans and what they are doing in response. Brought to You by Bombs and Budgets: Tools for Reclaiming Communities from Militarism, tries to get to the how of "bringing the war dollars home", as more and more people recognize the brutality and wastefulness of occupation. The workshops, which can be ...

Ten Years, Over a Trillion Dollars Later: What and How Much Has Changed?

As the tenth anniversary of September 11th passes, one question that is likely crossing many people’s minds is: What has changed ten years on? As mundane and somewhat cliché as this question may be, it has many of us weighing the costs along with the benefits of America’s campaign against “terror.” Unfortunately, for a segment of the American population, the answer to this question never goes beyond the rallying cry of patriotic retaliation and the abstract safety of US homeland security and defense policies. But what has this campaign really accomplished, other than embroiling us in two wars that have cost the US an unprecedented amount of funds? Have the number of ...

NATO's "Conspiracy" against the Libyan Revolution

In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal (19 July 2011), Max Boot— the aptly named neoconservative author and military historian known for his support for “democracy promotion” at the point of a gun, and an ardent supporter of full-scale US military engagement in Libya—referred to a Financial Times article (15 June) that compared the current aerial bombing campaign over Libya and the Kosovo air war in 1999 in order to emphasize “the lack of firepower in the Libya operation.” Boot commented, dwelling on the same comparison with additional details: The earlier war was hardly “Apocalypse Now”—it was tightly limited in its own right. But after 78 days in Kosovo, ...

A Critique of Reporting on the Middle East

I’ve spent most of the last eight years working in Iraq and also in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other countries in the Muslim world. So all my work has taken place in the shadow of the war on terror and has in fact been thanks to this war, even if I’ve labored to disprove the underlying premises of this war. In a way my work has still served to support the narrative. I once asked my editor at the New York Times Magazine if I could write about a subject outside the Muslim world. He said even if I was fluent in Spanish and an expert on Latin America I wouldn’t be published if it wasn’t about jihad. Too often consumers of mainstream media are victims of a fraud. You ...